In the earlier stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, Chancellor Rebecca Blank’s biggest priority was making sure UW-Madison finished its spring semester. As the university works to make that happen, Blank said it is taking the opportunity to tackle immediate concerns — including $100 million in losses — but also prioritize campus safety and prevention moving forward.
In Hyderabad, Bharat Biotech is collaborating with virologists at the University of Wisconsin (UW)-Madison and vaccine company FluGen on a “unique intranasal vaccine” called CoroFlu.
Chancellor Bernie Patterson said in a message to faculty and staff Wednesday that the university is expected to lose as much as $13.5 million through this August, forcing the school to cut costs where it can.
While the University of Wisconsin System and some UW campuses last week announced employee furloughs to save money in the face of looming recession-related reductions in state and local tax collections, many local governments in Dane County are making sure their employees get their hours, with some adjustments.
Seven University of Wisconsin System campuses have announced initial furlough plans for employees to address unprecedented budget shortfalls caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Details vary by campus and range from intermittent furloughs for faculty to several months of consecutive, unpaid leave for staff unable to work remotely.
“It was really clear the environment was a priority, and it was really clear we needed interdisciplinary training and research, but it wasn’t clear how to do that,” said Professor Paul Robbins.
The Madison Police Department has a short message to UW-Madison students mulling whether to attend the Mifflin Street Block Party slated for Saturday: Don’t.
“While MPD has historically taken a fairly tolerant view of the Mifflin Street Block Party, this year is different,” MPD Chief Vic Wahl said referring to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Basically the whole campus comes down and has a good time.” Mifflin Street resident and UW-Madison Junior Chris Gilbertson said. “I think that the precautions that they’re taking are unfortunate, but it’s necessary.”
“Seldom does a consumer go to a grocery store and want to buy a 5-pound bag of shredded cheese,” said Mark Stephenson, director of Dairy Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “They wanted maybe 1-pound bags at a time. You can’t just put 1-pound bags through a 5-pound line. Not possible. You have to have a different piece of equipment set up differently. We’ve had an industry that’s had to shuffle a great deal to move product from where it was produced before to where it needs to be today.”
Sue Wolfe said she was looking for a way to pay forward the warm messages of support health care professionals throughout the country have been receiving for their efforts combating COVID-19.
State is not currently in ventilator shortage, workgroup chair says guidelines are still necessary.
Noted: Aaron Olver is managing director of University Research Park in Madison. He is the former state Secretary of Commerce under former Gov. Jim Doyle.
At the University of Wisconsin, Madison, “I think we’re all rather underwhelmed” at what’s been seen among the few patients there who’ve tried it, said Dr. Nasia Safdar, medical director of infection control and prevention.
There are four players from the University of Wisconsin-Madison considered likely to be picked in the draft.
Noted: Misleading people by providing real information divorced from necessary context is not a unique strategy, said Dave Schroeder, a cybersecurity expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who tracks disinformation on social media.
He’s been following how public health information on the COVID-19 pandemic is being “attacked by actors with an agenda” and twisted to suit certain narratives.
Patrick Remington, professor emeritus at the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, said health officials would need to first determine the proportion of people who voted out of the total number of people who tested positive for COVID-19 during the time frame in which they could have exhibited symptoms from the April 7 election, or roughly two weeks.
“You have these complex networks of interactions that you wouldn’t be seeing under less disturbed circumstances,” Dave O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, told the Washington Post. “And that provides a lot of opportunities for these diseases to explore alternate hosts and acquire some of the features that would be necessary to make them” jump species.
“This is kind of the smoking gun,” says geochemist Annie Bauer of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was not part of the new study. “This is the most important evidence we can get [of early plate motion].”
Barry Burden, a professor of political science and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Newsweek that while Trump flipped Michigan from blue to red during the 2016 election, the 2018 mid-term elections signaled a possible shift as Democrats swept the state’s Senate and gubernatorial races.
Just over half of workers in Arizona, which had a relatively high minimum benefit of $172 before the crisis, are estimated to make more on unemployment than if they were still working, according to Noah Williams, the director of Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Dr. Huggett grew up on a farm in Wisconsin, the first member of his family to go to college. After getting a degree in biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin, he went on to medical school at the University of Chicago and later got a master’s degree in public health at Johns Hopkins University.
